Hey everyone! Just want to let you know that I'm alive. Dang, I never write in here anymore. I used to be way more regular about it.

So I'm back home in Livingston and it's actually going pretty well. My days consist of: waking up early, taking my sisters to school/daycare, cleaning the house, picking up the girls, and generally just taking care of them. It probably sounds like a sucky schedule, but I actually like it. It's nice being here and being involved, even if my family drives me crazy sometimes. My parents are never home because they work all the time and then they go to meetings and church and stuff after work. So I feel like I see them the same amount that I used to see them when I was in Riverside, haha.

I'm moving to Sacramento tomorrow! Well actually I'm just moving some of my stuff, like my air mattress, so I have something to sleep on when I go up there. My roommate Suzy and I found a cute little house with one bedroom, a bonus room, and one bathroom. The bonus room is big enough to be a bedroom, so Suzy is gonna have that. But it's actually a house! It's in a nice, quiet, safe neighborhood, and our landlords, who are a married couple, live right across the street. How funny is that? They're really nice. Here's a picture of the house:



Do you like it? I don't know why the sky looks so funky in that picture, haha. I got it from the ad on Craigslist. So I want everyone to come visit. Please? I know Sacramento is really far for most of you, but if you just so happen to be in the area, please stop by. Suzy and I wanna have guests.

I hope moving goes well. I'm never sure about these things until they're all done and I'm all settled and everything. I miss you guys!

So close. So very very close...

Last night I had a dream that Kelly Clarkson was my stepsister and I went to visit her in Texas (because that's where she's from, you know). She had a really nice apartment. We sang a lot and went out and did all this fun stuff, and she insisted on paying for everything because she's rich. It was a fun dream.

Oh wow, it's been like a month and a half since I've updated! I dunno, I do feel like writing sometimes, but I never get around to it. Let's see, what's going on in my life? Well, there's school, of course. I can't believe this is my last quarter at UCR, and that I'm graduating in like two months. It's crazy. These are the four classes I'm taking this quarter:

1) Advanced French Conversation: my favorite class, and easiest. We basically just sit around and talk and do activities and work on our pronunciation and fluidity. Today we talked about our astrological signs, haha.
2) Italian Urban Culture: taught in English. I'm a little nervous because I have to do some work in Italian, and it's been like a year since I've done that.
3) Advanced French Grammar and Stylistics: I'm nervous about this class because it's small and you really have to do the reading. And lots of group work, ugh.
4) French New Wave Cinema: taught in English. Probably the class I'm most worried about. Lots of reading, and she actually asks you questions about it, haha.

I love Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays because I only have one class, but Tuesdays and Thursdays suck because I have three classes back to back, plus a screening on Thursday after all of that.

I'm going home tomorrow because Sunday is Easter. It wasn't even my idea to go home this time; my mom suggested it. But I'm excited to go home, as always. I'm just gonna need a lot of caffeine for the drive.

Last night I watched True Life: I'm Addicted to Porn. It made me really sad! Whenever I watch shows like that (which is all the time), I root for the people and just really want them to get better. I feel like I should have been a therapist or a drug and alcohol counselor, haha. And tonight I watched True Life: I Need Anger Management, and that one made me sad too because this one guy really really reminded me of my brother.

So hey! My birthday is coming up in two weeks! Wednesday, April 22! (Earth Day, by the way.) I wanna have a party, and I would love it if you guys could come. How about the weekend after my birthday? (April 24-26). Friday or Saturday? Let me know if you can come. I wanna party with you guys! And it's my last birthday in Riverside, so I gotta make it good!

Okay, enough for now. I need to write in here more.

I'm at home for the weekend. The drive was good; it went by fast. My stepbrother Patrick is getting married in October and he's having his engagement party in Sacramento tomorrow. I'm gonna be in the wedding! I'm excited. We haven't had a wedding in my family in years!

UC Riverside is the featured article of the day on Wikipedia. Go UCR!

I'm in love with the Suze Orman Show. She gives such good financial advice. And I love her quirky little mannerisms, like how she calls everyone "boyfriend" and "girlfriend." And a lot of times her shows are themed. Like she had a Superbowl show, complete with cheerleaders, and last Saturday's show had a Valentine's Day theme.

I also watched this documentary on MSNBC or one of those channels called "House of Cards." It's all about how the financial crisis started and how so many people were buying houses that they couldn't afford. It was really scary to watch. I'm just glad that I'm too young to have a house right now. I'm so glad I don't have to worry about a mortgage or anything. And I don't think my parents are gonna lose our house (they haven't said anything about it), so I'm thankful for that.

Also, I just joined Netflix. I finally gave in. But I signed up for the plan where you can only have one DVD out at a time. I didn't wanna go crazy with it right away, haha. I like how you can watch some movies instantly online. I hope it doesn't take up too much of my time! I figured it would be a good idea to get it because I always have to watch foreign films for my classes, and I know Netflix has a bunch of them.

Man, it sounds like I have no life.

I went home last weekend. It was nice. Alexis is getting so big! She's grown since the last time I saw her, during winter break. And she's starting to get potty trained! I can't believe it. Breeanna's really cute too. Lindsey and I were talking about how it's important that we spend equal time with both girls and how we shouldn't compare them to each other. I don't want Breeanna to get jealous or feel left out, you know?

Sometimes I think I should have majored in journalism. I'm pretty interested in it, and the news has always intrigued me, even though it's depressing most of the time. UC Riverside doesn't even have a journalism major, but I think you can major in creative writing with an emphasis in journalism. Oh well.

So there's this new, dumb reality show on VH1 called Tool Academy. Have you heard of or seen it? I was watching it the other day and I was like, "Hey, I've been there!" One of my second cousins got married at the house where the show was filmed like two years ago. It's up in the hills in Simi Valley. It's a really huge, nice house. The wedding was awesome too. She married a rich guy from San Diego, haha.

I'm in a good mood today. We had a test in my scary French class and I think I actually did well on it! I haven't had that feeling in a long time. It's like when I was in high school, haha.

The other night I dreamed that I was at UC Irvine for some reason. I don't know if I was visiting someone or if I was a student there or what. So I went to get lunch and their commons area was super nice and fancy. I got lunch and it cost $31! I think I got sushi, and sushi can be kinda expensive, but $31? Come on now.

This month is gonna be very busy, and hopefully not too stressful. Lots of deadlines coming up! It's scary to think about the future.

My French Cinema professor (the one who is friends with her students on facebook) kinda looks like Molly Ringwald, haha.

I just watched the first episode of The Real World: Brooklyn. It was really good! There's a transgendered person on the cast. I think that's awesome.

My French Cinema professor is awesome. She encouraged us to add her on facebook! And after our screening on Tuesday, she and a bunch of people from the class went to the Getaway to have some food and talk about the movie. I wanted to go, but I had a lot of reading that night. But I think it's gonna be a weekly thing, so hopefully I can go to some of them. And we watched this awesome, adorable French movie called Avenue Montaigne (Fauteuils d'orchestre en français). I highly recommend it.

This quarter is all about French. I'm taking Advanced French Grammar and Stylistics, French Cinema, and Mythology in French Literature, Film and the Visual Arts. Lots of reading, in French!

Also, I can't stop listening to Cash Cash. They're extremely catchy. I wouldn't be surprised if they became really famous.

Hey everyone! Man, I've become so bad at updating this thing.

Well, I'm home with my family for winter break, and it's going pretty well. But I did have a very long, tiring, stressful day today. So my cousin Destinee (remember her? haha) is staying with us for about a week, and my sisters Lindsey and Breeanna and I made the two-hour drive to Tulare today to pick her up. We were driving back home and everything was fine, but then my steering wheel got really stiff and it was hard to turn, even just to change lanes. Then this little light came on that said "AMP" and had a picture of a battery, and then the "service engine soon" light came on. I got really nervous and I knew something was wrong, so I got off the freeway at the nearest exit. Mind you, we were in Fresno, which is about an hour away from my house.

After I got off the freeway, I was stopped at a red light, and all of a sudden a ton of smoke started billowing out from under the hood! Then the temperature gauge said the car was very very hot, but I think I could have figured that out from the smoke. Somehow I was able to steer the car into a gas station that was right off the freeway. After the smoke cleared and the car cooled down a little, I opened the hood and saw that one of the belts was broken, just as I had suspected.

Luckily, my mom's best friend Shelly lives in Clovis, so I was able to have the car towed to her house, which was 17 miles from where we were. My roadside assistance only covers towing for ten miles, so I had to pay $20 for the rest, which I didn't think was bad at all. The funny thing though is that Shelly and her kids are down in Redlands right now, visiting her mom. So now my car is in Clovis and Shelly's not even home! I guess my dad and I are gonna go there tomorrow and try to fix the car or something. I hope it works out.

I think I have the worst luck with cars. I've run out of gas four times in four different cars, and then I had my accident, and now this. I had Lindsey, Breeanna and Destinee in the car with me, and I was so nervous that we were gonna get in an accident because my steering was so stiff. However, I'm glad that this happened while I'm home because now my parents can help me and get the car checked out and stuff. We were extremely cold and hungry while waiting for the tow truck, but this whole thing could have turned out a lot worse. I'm just glad that the car didn't blow up and we didn't get in an accident or anything.

Ugh. I'm tired and hungry, and I have to go back to Clovis tomorrow.

Wow, I haven't written in here in almost two months. I just wanted to say hi and let you all know that I'm alive and I'm okay. I miss everyone! I hope you all are well.

The Killers' new album comes out in a few weeks! I'm excited. And tomorrow is election day! I'm even more excited about that. I can't wait to see what happens.

Last night I dreamed that I was at UCLA, and I think I was a student there. I was walking down this road towards my car, but the road was really long so I just kept walking and walking. Then, all of a sudden it got extremely windy, like the strongest wind I've ever experienced. It was so strong that I could barely walk, and then it even lifted me into the air and I was flying a little! It was so cool. I remember the campus being really big and it seemed really old too. I know UCLA is old, but it looked really old, like East Coast Ivy League old. It was the coolest dream, with the wind and everything.

I had terrifying dreams last night. They were so bad that I had to force myself to wake up in order to stop them. That hasn't happened to me in a really long time. The funny thing is, I can't even remember what happened in them. The only thing I remember is all of my family being in one place at the same time, at this really big, nice hotel, for a family reunion or something. But something bad happened and I can't remember. I was so confused and scared when I forced myself to wake up.

On a completely unrelated note, I just want to say that I really like Suave's cocoa butter lotion. It smells really good. I use it all the time at work and at home, and I'm constantly smelling my hands after I put it on because they smell so good. It's cheap too!

So apparently Madonna recently compared John McCain to Hitler, and Barack Obama to Gandhi, John Lennon and Al Gore. Interesting.

I'm in a really good mood today. I had to be on campus for an experiment at 9 am, but the good thing was that it forced me to wake up early on a Saturday, which I never do. Weekend mornings are kinda nice, and it was really nice walking through family housing listening to my music. The people in the lab are really cool too. Now I have the rest of the day to do whatever I want!

My hair is falling out and I don't know why. Isn't that weird? Every time I rinse out my hair, there are like five or six hairs sitting in the sink. I really don't want to go bald. I'm only 22! They always say that baldness skips a generation, and my grandpa on my mom's side is super bald. Hopefully I'm just freaking out over nothing and it's not a big deal.

Buttercup likes to sleep on my bed. I think that's so cute.

Today my horoscope said "You will have a surprising amount of energy today, considering how tired you've been lately!" Which is funny, because I was extremely tired today. Work was miserable. It was so hard to get through the day. Especially since I really don't have that much to work on right now. I've been going out so much lately and it's taking a toll on me. That's why my status on facebook says "Daniel needs to take a break," haha. I mean, I've been having fun and meeting new people, but I'm just tired. I need to rest for a couple days.

Dating is complicated and frustrating. I feel like a kid who's not getting his way, haha. I wish I could read people's minds. Sorry I'm being cryptic.

So I went to the Stanislaus County Fair today, even though I live in Merced County. But the counties are so small up here that you can go from one to the other quite easily. Besides, the Stanislaus fair is better than the Merced fair anyway. I went to help my sister take tickets at the gate because it's a fundraiser for her colorguard and they need an "adult" there. They do it every year, but this was the first time I actually worked. It was so fun to just stand there and watch the people come in. There were lots of different kinds of people, but I was surprised at how many cowboys there were. I was like, "where do they come from?" I guess they live out in the country. Oakdale is the "Cowboy Capital of the World," after all.

We worked from 4:30 till 11:00, just standing in the same place (my feet are tired), and then we had to go turn the stuff in. But to do that, we had to walk through the main path through the fair, where all the food and beer gardens are. You can imagine that by 11:00 pm there were a LOT of drunk cowboys at the fair. It was pretty interesting trying to walk through there without stepping on someone's boots and making them angry. Someone actually spilled beer on me and then a fight was gonna break out, so I had to get out of there. I just went to the side and met up with my sister after. Ah, the fair. It's so fun in its own way, with its food that smells really good and the drunk cowboys and the country music and the smell of the hay from the livestock area. I didn't realize how much I missed little things like the fair.

So yeah, I'm at home for the weekend. I don't know how I made it up here in one piece Thursday night. I got here at 2:00 am, completely exhausted. Thank God for good playlists. Tomorrow is my sister's 16th birthday party and I'm really excited because she's really excited. She got a new dress and heels and everything. And it's at a Mexican restaurant so there's gonna be Mexican food, my favorite! Then I'm going back to Riverside on Monday. Hopefully I won't be as tired as I was on the way up here. I'm gonna try to leave during the day.

That's all. I just wanted to talk about the fair.

Thanks for the comments on my last entry, guys. They mean a lot to me and help me feel better. I guess I should let it out and not keep it all in.

I've been working a lot (pretty much full time), which is good because I'm really broke right now and I'll get a nice big paycheck on August 1. I'm counting down the days. I'm also counting the days till I go home for my sister's birthday. I can't believe she's turning 16! I feel old. Her birthday is July 28 (the same as Teresa's!) so I'll probably go home the 25th. We're having a party for her at this Mexican restaurant in my town, so that should be good, even though she's not really excited about it because she'd rather have it somewhere else.

I've been watching a lot of movies lately. On Sunday I watched Waiting for Guffman and Romy and Michele's High School Reunion with Nick. They're both really funny. I've been wanting to see Romy and Michele's for a long time. Now I wanna see all of Christopher Guest's movies. I also finally watched Zoolander with French yesterday and that was really funny too.

I'm not trying out for American Idol this year because I just can't make it to the auditions. There's one in San Francisco tomorrow and another one in Phoenix I think next week. I can't go because I'm super broke right now and I'd have to drive all the way there and probably get a hotel room and everything. If they were having an audition in LA then I might have been able to do it, like I did two years ago. Oh well, I guess we'll see about next year. I think they're doing American Idol at least through season 10.

I haven't been sleeping well at all. It's weird, usually I sleep through the night with no problems, but ever since I moved into the apartment I've been waking up in the middle of the night every night. I think it's because I'm sleeping on an air mattress and it's not very comfortable. My back hurts every morning. It's supposed to be temporary until I get a real bed, and I'm hoping to get Nick's bed because he just got a new one.

That's about it I guess. Hope you all are doing well!

I went to see The Strangers tonight and oh man, it's so good. You have to see it. My expectations were not that high but I was very pleased. The only thing that kinda sucked was that there were a lot of people talking and making noise and being stupid in the theater. That really aggravates me. Maybe I shouldn't go to see movies when they first come out. Sometimes I feel like I'm a grumpy old man. But yes, go see The Strangers.

Last night I had a dream that I went to Spain with Lisa. Which is funny because Bryan, Carol and Kyrie are going to Spain, not Lisa. When we arrived in Madrid it was raining unbelievably hard, like a rainstorm of Biblical proportions. We had to catch this bus but the water was all the way up to the top of the bus. But for some reason I wasn't afraid; it was more like an adventure. Lisa and I made it onto the bus alright and rode it out to our town in the countryside.

It was one of the most vivid dreams I've ever had; I remember the way the sky looked and the colors and the weather and the signs in the streets and everything. And Lisa was my travel buddy. The whole time I just had this feeling that everything was going to be okay, no matter what. Despite the rainstorm and despite the difficulties of living in a foreign country, I wasn't worried. When I woke up I had this feeling like "I can do this. I can live abroad. But first I have to get my passport." It's weird that it happened in Spain and not Italy or France or Germany.

I don't know if this makes sense. It's super late and I'm tired.

Okay this is really weird. Look what someone just IMed me:

[04:05] CombinedSalmon: They should return to the place whence they came, thence be drawn to the Common place of Execution upon Hurdles, and there to be Hanged by the Necks, then cut down alive, their Privy-Members cut off, and Bowels taken out to be burnt before their Faces, their Heads to be severed from their Bodies, and their Bodies divided into four parts, to be disposed of as the King should think fit.

I don't know this person! I've never seen this screen name before in my life! And it's 4:08 am! Ahh this is so weird. I think I should go to bed.

Three things that happened to me, in chronological order:

On Sunday night I was taking a shower at like 2:15 am (this is normal for me) and all of a sudden I heard someone open the bathroom door, rush inside and start vomiting very loudly. It sounded pretty bad, but it ended as fast as it started. I'm actually surprised that this is the first time this has happened to me, considering I often take showers at this time and I am in college. Poor guy. I don't know who it was because I could only hear him and not see him, but I hope he didn't have a midterm the next day or anything.

On Monday morning around 10 a.m. I was walking very quickly to my sociology class because I was running late (as usual). I wasn't paying attention because all I could think about was the test that I was about to take, and plus I was listening to my iPod kinda loud. So I stepped into the street to jaywalk as I usually do, but I wasn't looking and all of a sudden I got hit by a girl on a bike. Don't worry, I didn't get hurt; she had enough time to slow down a little but not all the way. She just kinda bumped me awkwardly on the leg. Of course it was totally my fault because I wasn't paying attention and I felt really bad, so I apologized profusely and kept walking on. The whole thing lasted like three seconds. Very surreal.

Finally, I found two quarters in the treadmill at the gym tonight. Fifty whole cents! Go me.

I haven't written in a really long time. I don't know why. I guess I just haven't felt like writing. But I'm alive and I'm here and I'm okay, just so you know.

I feel...lonely. It's weird. I don't know why I feel this way but I do. I hang out with people all the time, but at the end of the day I just feel alone. I wish I could explain the way I feel.

Hope you guys are doing well.